Focusing on Virginia Woolf and her circle, past and present

Woolf sightings: Seventy-six in two weeks

Two weeks of Woolf sightings here, so there are lots to peruse. Second up is news about a children’s book titled Virginia Wolf, which is loosely based on the relationship between Virginia and Vanessa Stephen. Another blurb about the book is #41. Scroll on down to #s 15-23 for several references to Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Are You My Mother? Then read about a cartoonist who has featured Virginia Woolf’s brain in a 1962 cult classic indy film. See #s 29-30.

Room of their own, Blue Springs Examiner
The famous author Virginia Woolf once said that it’s crucial to have a room of one’s own. That very thought can be applied to Ethan and Nathan Baldwin of Blue Springs, two 18-year-olds who are unlike many boys …

The Secret to Better Blogging, Business 2 Community (blog)
One example of such a writer is the novelist Virginia Woolf. Describing her production of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf wrote, “the idea started as the oyster starts or the snail to secrete a house for itself. And this it did without any conscious direction.

A cartoonist gets personal, Salon
BNR: You were talking to her all the time, transcribing your conversations with her, and you had all these letters and diaries, and really precise memories, and then all of your reading, of Winnicott and Virginia Woolf and ”The Drama of the Gifted …

Book review: Nest The Art of Birds, Fraser Coast Chronicle
She cites Virginia Woolf, Karen Blixen, Shelley, Wordsworth, Robert Frost and many others as avid bird watchers, evidenced in their poems and stories. Nearer home, she delights in the extraordinary nests made by the blue wren, the mudlark and the …

This Week’s Hot Reads April 30, 2012, Daily Beast
She frames her journey toward understanding and forgiveness as a kind of discussion with people like Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, and 20th-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, whose own internal lives gave them no small amount of trouble.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, The AtlanticVirginia Woolf held that there are two kinds of truth: reason and imagination. “The biographer cannot extract the atom,” she wrote. Fiction tells elemental truths; biography is just “the husk.” But if you’re a lifelong documentarian of your own …

Josephine King Connects Madness and Art in London, Daily Beast
And the list goes on: Lord Byron, Paul Gaugin, Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keeffe. These are only a few of the many artists and writers thought to have had manic depression. In her lauded book, Touched with Fire, the well-known bipolar psychologist and …

“The Refusal of Time”, Harvard Magazine… it is possible for novelty to happen—for “the shards to be rearranged, to be made new.” Spencer Lenfield ’12 is a former Ledecky Fellow at Harvard Magazine. He has just completed his senior thesis on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

Vita and Virginia, The Independent Weekly
It usually surprises readers to learn that Orlando—whose sublime exploits as a gender-flipping, time-traveling hero/heroine that Virginia Woolf chronicled in the novel of the same name—actually existed. Her real name was Vita Sackville-West, …

Book Review: The Forrests, New Zealand Herald
Within a few pages I felt I was in the company of a contemporary Katherine Mansfield or Virginia Woolf. Why? It is to do with Perkins’ attention to the sentence, to the slow mesmeric pace, to the minute details, to the sweet power of analogy and the …

‘Are You My Mother?’ by Alison Bechdel, New York Times
Mixed in are multiple undigested chunks of text from writers like Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud and Alice Miller. If “Fun Home” was a book about a funeral home, “Are You My Mother?” is merely funereal. As if it were a deck of playing cards, …

Are You My Mother?, USA TODAY
Bechdel draws on Virginia Woolf for illumination of her own mother-daughter issues. (Woolf’s mother died when the writer was 13 and remained an obsession until Woolf completed her novel To the Lighthouse at age 44.) Along with describing her life …

Can Self-Exposure Be Private?, New Yorker (blog)
She believes, as Virginia Woolf wrote, that “the time to read poetry is when we are almost able to write it.” By turns, Davey is comforted and horrified by the isolation inherent to reading and writing. Even while she embeds herself in her apartment, …

To hell with hope, Calcutta Telegraph
Asha is the slum’s number one fixer, but her daughter, Manju, struggles with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway because knowledge of English is an avenue to escape from the slum. People in Annawadi, their surroundings notwithstanding, have aspirations and, …

At the heart of being human, Evening Standard
The effect is oddly like a rude, demotic, masculine revision of Virginia Woolf. For although the female characters are well enough formed, Mark Haddon remains a writer clearly most at home delineating male limitations and boyish recourses — he loves …

A little bit of hush, The Age
”THAT silence is more profound after noise,” wrote Virginia Woolf in Orlando, ”still wants the confirmation of science.” In the decades since Orlando was published, scientists have cautiously confirmed this – but not for everyone.

DARRELL NORMAN: Where does the spark come from?, Gadsden TimesVirginia Woolf patterned her most famous character, Clarissa Dalloway, after a family friend, a status-conscious socialite who greatly influenced Virginia and her sister, Vanessa. Arthur Conan Doyle patterned Sherlock Holmes after a doctor who taught …

Writing Britain: the nation and the landscape, The Guardian
The French situationist Guy Debord is said to be the father of psychogeography, but the BL exhibits put the art of walking in a context that’s earlier and closer to home, one that stretches from John Gay and William Blake to Virginia Woolf, …

For Kids: Dealing with a dark mood, Montreal Gazette
The publisher’s bumf that accompanied this book quotes from a Kirkus review that “knowledge of Virginia Woolf and her painter-sister Vanessa Bell is unnecessary” – that this book works “as a bad-day/bad-mood or animal-transformation tale” – but for any …

Emma Goldman’s Sexological Obsession, Swans
As Haaland adds: “Unlike other feminist authors such as Virginia Woolf, who thoroughly and cogently critiqued patriarchal institutions, Goldman did not treat as synonymous ‘men’ and the ‘public realm’ and, therefore, made no strong condemnations of men …

In Woolf’s footsteps, The Christian Century
With my husband and my daughter, I traced the path novelist Virginia Woolf took through Italy in 1908, when she was still Virginia Stephen. I followed in her footsteps as best I could, searching for the sights she described in her diary, …

Angelica Garnett, Telegraph.co.uk
Angelica Garnett, the artist and writer, who has died aged 93, was the daughter of Vanessa Bell and niece of Virginia Woolf, and within the Bloomsbury soap opera of high art and serial bed-hopping had the misfortune to be given one of the most gripping …

Off the Beat: Drinking liquid genius, Daily Californian
As Virginia Woolf argues in one of my all-time favorite books (read: long essay), A Room of One’s Own, what a woman writer needs in order to let her true writing genius out is an income and — you guessed it — a room of her own.

Tribeca Film Festival 2012, Tiny Mix Tapes
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and built on documentary footage with Parisian prostitutes, this debut by Polish director Szumowska nicely reverses expectations. The sex scenes are so transactional they are stripped of eros, …

Profile: Author Kate Grenville in her own words, Northside
Then I read Virginia Woolf’s first book; it was all right but not that good, which was hugely encouraging for me. From there, I worked in the film industry and went to London, where I really started to write (Grenville’s first book of short stories, …

Graphic Displays of Motherhood, Vanity Fair
Told through a series of therapy sessions, with the specters of Virginia Woolf and Daniel Winnicott hovering nearby, Bechdel draws out the ways in which growing up with a depressed, narcissistic mother, who had once dreamed of being an artist herself, …

Step 9 (of 12), Trafalgar Studios – review, Evening Standard
He’s certainly more convincing when cheekily poking his nose through a hole in a partition wall than he is when riffing poetically on his past or talking about the books that have informed his unexpected lyricism (Virginia Woolf, among others).

Top 5: The Best of the Bard, Duke University
This play contains the most bravura recognition scene of them all and seems to have been written especially for that scene. It also contains one of the most beautiful songs: “Fear no more the heat of the sun” which Virginia Woolf was to borrow for Mrs.

Im the madam and Im not repenting, IBNLive.com
“I get inspiration from certain authors like Virginia Woolf, Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut and even PG Wodehouse. I have even critiqued them in my book,” she added. At the event, the audience had a wonderful time listening to Saaz read out stories with …

Einstein beached at Barbican, WhatsOnStage.com (blog)
The audience also included Miranda Richardson (with Richard Wilson, no relation), who gave one of her greatest performances at the Edinburgh Festival of 1996 in Wilson’s version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Otherwise, we’ve been starved of his work …

War of words in fight for Women’s Library, ITV News
Since the library was established, as part of the National Society of Women’s Suffrage, it has attracted writers, academics and politicians, including Vera Brittain, Eleanor Rathbone and Virginia Woolf. In the 1950s it was renamed the Fawcett Library …

Review: Step 9 (Of 12), Trafalgar Studios, *****, Fourthwall
It opens with recovering alcoholic Keith, portrayed with strength by Blake Harrison, sitting in a dishevelled armchair in his bedsit with a Virginia Woolf novel in one hand and a pipe in the other. This contrived façade of debonair decadence quickly …

‘Lives of the Novelists,’ by John Sutherland, New York TimesVirginia Woolf may have suffered it from a half brother, allowing critics to read her work as a response to the “male-made mess” of the world. After doctors told him he had a brain tumor, Anthony Burgess hurriedly embarked on a sequence of “Damoclean” …

Antigone in Afghanistan, Irish Times
The Watch, dedicated to the Afghan people, is the first title from a new imprint, Hogarth, honouring the pioneering press founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf during another war, in 1917. By drawing on classical literature, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya …

Hatching beauty, The Age
These enchanting philosophical possibilities take Burke from animal architecture to evolutionary theory, from Charles Darwin to Richard Dawkins and from Virginia Woolf to contemplative bush walks along the Great Ocean Road. We delve into the lives of …

To the River, By Olivia Laing, The Independent
It is a book that exemplifies Herman Melville’s idea that “meditation and water are wedded”; as Laing walks, she reflects on the history and culture of the region: from medieval folktales to the novels of Virginia Woolf, who drowned in the river in …

Tales of wayward women, Philippine Star
The women here are not “angels in the house,” in the immortal phrase coined by Virginia Woolf, nor are they the “ilaw ng tahanan” (lamp of the home). While gathering poems for this anthology, Ms. Dawson avoided those that portrayed women as being …

References to Virginia Woolfs’ essay The Art Of Biography appear in Pushing against the dark : writing about the hidden self an article written by Roberet Dessaix which appears in the latest Australian Book Review.

A moment of joy for me when I was reading this article yesterday morning.